St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Web Design’

View the new version of the Florida Photo Gallery

Florida Photo Gallery gets a long needed makeover.

by Texx Smith

The oldest of my oldest websites that still live is Florida Photo Gallery.  Photography has long been a passion of mine and this website used to be a source of pride for me.  The photos there were always nice, and the web site itself used to be  a thing of beauty and a showcase of cutting edge HTML and CSS technology.  It was one of the first websites in thew world to used CSS to create “rollover buttons” that used CSS instead of images to create the rollover effect and it also had an ingenious script that detected your monitor size and served a background image of a size based on the size of your monitor.  The latter was the forefathers of our much imitated,  Responsive Design technology in fact.

The new version of the website isn’t groundbreaking in any way, but it does use several cutting edge technologies which provides several features for us and the user:

• AJAX and CSS animated page transitions

• We’re talking subtle ones that work in any modern web browser, not the old school Internet Explorer only stuff.

• In an instantly (no loading time) appearing lightbox that automatically scaled to the screen size
• In a full blown article, for those who like to know the story behind the photo.

• Including a search feature, of course

The short answer – Nothing, yet.

HTML 5 features just don't live up to the hype...

In the short term there is no reason at all for most small to medium web design clients to use the newest  features of the latest version of HTML.  I know this is going to probably rile up some web designers out there so let’s explore the issue a little further.  For some it can be very useful, we’ll get into the those few instances further down.

What is HTML?

HTML stands for “Hypertext Markup Language”  it’s the code that tells a web browser how and where to display what on a web page.  Other programming languages can do this too, but it most cases they are taking variables and logic and outputting HTML to the web browser.  HTML is usually combined with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for control the formatting of the HTML elements on a page.  Before CSS was invented HTML was used for the formatting, it still can format the  elements on a page and in some cases, still is.  To keep this conversation simple enough for clients to understand we will speak as little as possible about CSS and the formatting of HTML elements in this article.

Continue reading “HTML 5 – What does it do for the Client?” »

Several times when our sales reps go on a sales call, they’ve been heard a “no phrase” that they just can’t beat:

We just want a simple web site with no bells and whistles for cheap, really cheap.

Cheap Web Design starts with no bells and whistles. By focusing on only the aspects of a web site that are the most important to the success of a web site, you can save a ton of money!

Since the economy has turned south we’ve heard this numerous times.  The search engine data reflects this trend.  Google says people are searching for the phrase “Cheap Web Design” more than 100 times as much as “inexpensive web design” and over 1000 times as much as “quality web design”.  It’s pretty clear that for a lot of small business, price is the #1 concern when it comes to building their web presence.

There’s no way we’re getting out of the full service web design business, we just love it too much.  But the market is speaking pretty clearly.  We’ve always had quite reasonable prices and gave amazing service, but there’s a lot of small business owners out there with no web site at all or one of those really bad, “make your own web site for free” (which aren’t actually free, just cheap).  We knew we could give the small business community of America a better choice.  So after careful thought, we’ve come up with a new branch of services that offers high quality web sites for cheap! We call it, appropriately: Cheap Web Design

Learn more:

• How can we do web design so cheaply?
  • Basically, we focus on providing only the features of a web site that are the most important to the success of a web site.
  • The above page also tells you about the few things one gives up with a cheap web design package?
• A big part of why we can do web design so cheaply is our streamlined cheap web design process.
• We still use our 2 proof process to ensure high quality web sites . . .

We’re proud to launch our in house made client info and proofing system. Behind a password protected front end we’ve created a custom section for each client with client news just for them, a summary of their account status, proofs of their latest web designs, if any are available and a simple feed back form for approval and feedback on these proofs.
Like we said it’s pass word protected so if you are awaiting a proof we’ll be contacting you soon (if we haven’t already) with your user name and password to the client info center.

Web Design Screen Shot

We’ve just completed a website design for a Sarasota Business. Sarasota Home Care is a small business serving Sarasota. They provide non medical home care for elderly (and other) residents. Things like, well just read the sight.

This is a 100 valid XHTML and CSS site.  It’s completely table free.  It uses horizontal lists in places.  It also applies CSS styling by using id attribute instead of the class= attribute like we usually do.  I don’t think I’ll switch to this method permanently.  It like to use the ID tag to call programmed actions often instead.  But it can be handy if your already assigning unique ID’s to elements because of programmed objects then you don’t have to clutter your code with css.  Plus that means a web designer can edit it in the future itself a programmer or myself . . .

I was working on a project at home today and wanted to set the first letter of the FAQ paragraphs (The “Q” and the “A”) be larger than the rest of the letters. I knew I use CSS to do this quickly and easily, but had forgotten how. It may be a surprise to some of those I’ve taught, but I am not, in fact, able to remember every single tag in every single language there ever was or is currently, pretty close to all of them, but not quite 100%.

I realized tat my CSS reference book was out on loan. Hmmm, I tried looking it up in Dreamweavers reference section, but it wasn’t there. So I turned to the to internet. I was shocked at how complicated some people think this is. Some people use a span tag and then pseudo classes of the span tag. Some people were even using JavaScript! This is how is done, the quick and easy and proper way:
.YourClassNameHere p {font-size: 12pt}
p:first-letter {color:#ff0000;font-size:xx-large}

Feel free to substitute “xx-large” with whatever value is appropriate.
This will . . . well I hope at this point it’s obvious what this code will do.